What I Make My Self Marie Skinner, First Place
My path to self-discovery has been a subtractive process: cutting away to reveal something already there rather than building up from a bare framework. When I was very young—let’s say four or five years old because it was before my family moved into the yellow house with the giant maple tree in the front yard, but after the tiny apartment with cut-out bricks—I went to a church and colored with brittle crayons that snapped in my hands until they were unwieldy stubs that made me color out of the lines. One girl claimed she had a baby sister who pronounced “yellow” as “lello,” and “pink” as “bink.” I thought the girl, whose dress was prettier than mine and who had her very own purse (into which I suspect many of the crayons had vanished), was a liar. That girl tried to keep every color away from me except [ 124 ]
brown, so perhaps therein lies the seed of my mistrust. After coloring, we moved hard plastic chairs over the wooden floors into a circle and the stranger who had been tasked with tending us began to teach us a song. Somehow, I knew the song! I was so surprised that I knew it, and I was incredibly proud. The teacher taught us another, and I knew it even better than the first. The teacher let me show the class the actions that went along with the song. When my mother came to collect me, I was lost in a haze of self-satisfaction and awe. How did I know that I’m a child of God? How did I know that Jesus wants me for a sunbeam? But know it I did. It’s not a mystery now why I knew, but at the time, being in an unfamiliar context made it impossible for me to connect cause and effect, and I internalized how good it felt to know the answers. From that point on, I lost sight of any other way of being. “I” was the girl with the answers, and since the first of those wonderful, fulfilling answers was about my relationship to God, that’s who I was, too. A child of God, 110%. At least on Sunday, when anyone was asking questions to which I already knew the answers. The answers kept coming, and “I” kept expanding. But all that was additive. New friends, new interests, new knowledge. New mistakes, new hang-ups, new heartbreaks. It’s what I do or have done, not what I am. To discover self is to chip away everything extra, like carving a block of marble and discovering the sculpture inside. Discovering that, discovering myself in all the
